Integrating Time in Environmental Sociology: Research Avenues from Various Time Epistemologies

While space has been a central focus of environmental sociologists, less attention has been devoted to time. The sociology of the environment and the sociology of time emerged during the same period. In the 1970s, both disciplines started to challenge the prevailing tendency to consider the biophysical environment and time, respectively, as unquestioned background conditions. A similar, longstanding debate exists between a realist and a constructivist approach in each of these two fields. The dearth of scholars who developed a socio-ecological theorization of time (Elias 1992; Adam 1998; Urry 2000; Murphy 2001; Newton 2003; Bansal and Knox-Hayes 2013; Lockie 2014; Lockie and Wong 2018) share a common concern for the need to reconsider the dualistic distinction between “social” and “natural” time. The analysis should not only deal with human beings and their relationship to time, but also with the specific temporality of biophysical processes in their interlinkage with the multiple temporalities of social processes. Time related concepts (sustainability, transition, the Anthropocene...) as well as specific temporal features of Earth system processes (acceleration, tipping points, uncertainty, irreversibility...) are key to deepen our understanding of the constraints we face when tackling the current socioenvironmental threats, as well as to envision new potential pathways to social transformation. The paper argues that socio-ecological theorization of time would enrich several strands of research in environmental sociology. More temporal thinking entails theoretical and empirical scholarship that explicitly engages time as a central dimension of analysis or object of study. I will draw on an original epistemological quartet (time conceived, perceived, imagined and planned in Ruwet, 2021) highlighting two major dimensions of knowledge production and reception around time (institutional-subjective and contextualized-decontextualized) to illustrate the interest of this framework for new directions in environmental sociology.